Countering disinformation against renewable energy projects
Building renewable energy projects needs to be protected from a coordinated disinformation campaign by fossil fuel think tanks and companies. Here are some effective strategies that have worked.
Building solar PV projects requires local, state, and federal environmental permits. These processes include public meetings to gather community input for regulatory and town approvals.
My experience with numerous projects is that one or two vocal neighbors can organize an effective public fight against project approvals using Facebook and GoFundMe.com. These neighbors do not want any new renewable energy construction—solar PV, wind turbines, battery storage, or electric transmission lines—anywhere in their communities.
, professor at Stanford University wrote about the problem of a small group of outspoken neighbors using public approval processes to block beneficial renewable energy projects in “Vetocracy and Climate Adaptation.”We have a big collective action problem: society has a large interest in mitigating and adapting to climate change, but cannot find a path to acting on it due to the way that institutions are structured. When a political system with many checks and balances combines with partisan polarization, the results are what I labeled “vetocracy,” and the bottom-line result is inaction on the most pressing issues of the day.
Standing in front of numerous public hearings, I was subjected to the anti-renewable energy playbook as a few individuals sought to stop our proposed project. I remember one or two people coming to the microphone at each hearing and pulling out a pad of paper to ask the same questions, such as:
“Would the solar panels leach toxic chemicals into the water supply (for a project on a municipal landfill)?”
“Would the electromagnetic radiation from the panels cause brain damage to students (for a high school rooftop project)?”
“Would the solar panels blind pilots on commercial aircraft and cause jets to crash (for a project on a municipal landfill)?
The opponents of renewable energy also have an organized hit squad on social media. When I began posting trending clean energy technology news on LinkedIn, I was surprised at the volume of angry comments on the news I posted from Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other mainstream newspapers.
The pattern was always the same. A lead person would start the posting onslaught with a derisive comment about renewable energy with at least one clean-energy disinformation nugget, often adding a personal insult to me. Within hours of the lead person’s attack, 1,000 or more angry people often piled onto the initial attack. Upon checking, I found the same lead people from the oil and gas industry starting the comments.
Disinformation is meant to kill renewable energy project approvals. Two news articles highlight the damage false information causes to proposed projects.
The Boston Globe published, “Activists are spreading misinformation about whale deaths to obstruct clean energy policies, researchers find.” This article uncovers the coordinated, national campaign to stop local clean energy projects.
The Save the Whales Coalition is made up, for instance, of The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that received funding from the fossil fuel industry in the past and now does not disclose its donors, and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. Both groups publish works denying the scientific consensus around climate change. Its third member, the American Coalition for Ocean Protection, was founded by David Stevenson, who, as a director at a libertarian think tank called the Caesar Rodney Institute, has led opposition to offshore wind up and down the East Coast. That coalition, in turn, serves as an umbrella organization to which many grass-roots groups opposing offshore wind projects belong.
The second article, published by ProPublica, shows how the fossil-fuel industry co-opted a local newspaper, the Mount Vernon News, to “stop the solar invasion” (Fossil Fuel Interests Are Working to Kill Solar in One Ohio County. The Hometown Newspaper Is Helping).
Farmers in Knox County, OH, want to lease their land to a solar PV project developer, Open Road Renewables, to pay for their retirement. However, NIMBY opponents, with help from fossil-fuel businesses and the Mount Vernon News, are fighting the farmers’ ability to rent their land. The Mount Vernon News was sold to “Metric Media, which operates websites that reportedly engage in pay-to-play coverage” (Source: ProPublica]. In the case of the Ohio solar PV project, the paper began running anti-solar ads and content soon after an opposition group formed by oil and gas industry players.
Project-specific actions to counter disinformation
The first step in preparing to build a renewable energy project is to start a professional communication process. This process includes hiring a public communications firm and a government relations firm with a local registered lobbyist.
The public relations firm will help set up a project-specific website. For example, Open Road Renewables set up frasiersolar.com for its 120-megawatt solar PV project in Knox County, Ohio. This website tells the story of the solar PV project’s local benefits to stakeholders such as land-owning farmers, municipalities, counties, contractors, and businesses.
The project benefits are clear, concise, compelling, and presented in plain English without jargon. Farmers receive a funding stream for their retirements and college funds for their children and grandchildren. Municipalities and counties benefit from new tax revenues to support schools, police and fire services, and career centers. Local contractors get contracts to hire local workers, and, in many cases, new workers get training in installing solar PV systems and connecting the systems to the electricity grid.
The public website also enables community allies to counter anti-solar disinformation with friends and family.
In addition to public communications, project developers need a local government relations firm to navigate the regional political jurisdictions and regulatory processes. These firms facilitate public educational meetings and help open the process of negotiating the tax rates, construction hours, traffic patterns, and any special requests for landscaping and fences with mayors or other public officials. They help identify the real community concerns project developers can address through design.
While these steps are necessary, they are not sufficient. The project managers and engineers presenting the project at public meetings must address the prepared, disinformation-laden questions.
Step one is to answer the disinformation questions with linguist George Lakoff’s “truth sandwich.”
Truth Sandwich:
1. Start with the truth. The first frame gets the advantage.
2. Indicate the lie. Avoid amplifying the specific language if possible.
3. Return to the truth. Always repeat truths more than lies.
A key idea is not to repeat and amplify the lie by using the “not” before the lie. Instead of saying the project will not leach toxic chemicals into the water supply, say that the panels are safe. Then, say, for example, that the panels have been tested for safety in government laboratories and found safe. Also, note that the panel technology has been used safely worldwide for decades.
Two sources to help project developers counter falsehoods with facts are provided by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and the Alliance for Climate Transition:
Rebutting 33 False Claims about Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia Law School, 2024. For solar PV projects, the Center rebuts 14 false claims. For example, the first false claim addressed is the alleged danger of electromagnetic fields.
False Claim #1: Electromagnetic fields from solar farms are harmful to human health.
The electromagnetic fields generated at a solar farm are similar in strength and frequency to those of toaster ovens and other household appliances—and harmless to humans. A detailed analysis from North Carolina State University concluded that there is “no conclusive and consistent evidence” of “negative health impact[s] from the EMF [electromagnetic fields] produced in a solar farm.”
EMF exposure levels vary according to the EMF source, proximity to the source, and duration of the exposure.32 On a solar farm, EMFs are highest around electrical equipment such as inverters. However, even when standing next to the very largest inverter at a utility-scale solar farm, one’s exposure level (up to 1,050 milligauss, or mG) is less than one’s exposure level while operating an electric can opener (up to 1,500 mG), and well within accepted exposure limits (up to 2,000 mG). When standing just nine feet from a residential inverter, or 150 feet from a utility-scale inverter, one’s exposure drops to “very low levels of 0.5 mG or less, and in many cases . . . less than background levels (0.2 mG).” For comparison, a typical American’s average background exposure level is 1mG, reaching 6 mG when standing three feet from a refrigerator, and 50 mG when standing three feet from a microwave.
The electromagnetic fields present on a solar farm constitute “non-ionizing radiation,” which, by definition, generates “enough energy to move atoms in a molecule around (experienced as heat), but not enough energy to remove electrons from an atom or molecule (ionize) or to damage DNA.” In addition, EMFs are extremely low in frequency, which means they contain “less energy than ther commonly encountered types of non-ionizing radiation like radio waves, infrared radiation, and visible light.
Misinformation Tracker, by ACT, the Alliance for Climate Transition. The website “debunks 63 common myths related to climate change using academic and federal data, [and] organizes misinformation by state across the Northeast, from Maine to New York.” [Source: The Boston Globe]. The tracker is designed to help clean energy proponents respond quickly to false posts on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) and to prepare for conversations over the dinner table with friends and family. The ACT website aims to be the Politifact for clean energy.
While these tools and approaches are helpful, our democracy and clean energy futures need better solutions to counter the flood of lies from MAGA politicians, social media, and partisan news commentators.
Citizens need to know the truth about clean energy and climate change with verifiable facts. Where there can be honest differences of opinion, we need a common set of truths to foster principled arguments.
Lies undermine good decisions that protect our collective safety and well-being. Just like the lies about the COVID-19 vaccine and cigarette smoking, the lies about climate change and clean energy are harmful to all Americans. For example, the Fifth National Climate Assessment estimates hundreds of billions of dollars in property losses from major storms and wildfires.
Between 2018 and 2022, 89 such events affected the US, including 4 droughts, 6 floods, 52 severe storms, 18 tropical cyclones, 5 wildfires, and 4 winter storm events. During this period, Florida had the highest total damages ($140 billion) and experienced the highest damages from a single event—Hurricane Ian ($113 billion). Over the 1980–2022 period, Texas had the highest total damages ($375 billion).
It is time to turn away from lie-spewing social media platforms and “news” outlets so we can solve the climate change crisis affecting our communities with clean energy solutions. Let’s support quality journalism with strong, embedded fact-checking in their DNA.
Additional ideas to counter disinformation
Additional reading on addressing disinformation:
Framelab. “FrameLab is a newsletter about politics, language, and your brain. It was founded by Dr. George Lakoff and Gil Duran in 2017.” “Our goal with FrameLab is to help our readers understand how political language works, and to illuminate the key frames in our political discourse – ideological structures are often hiding in plain sight. We also analyze and deconstruct propaganda tactics which, unfortunately, are accelerating in the digital age.”
Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabatoging America. Barbara McQuade, 2024, Seven Stories Press. The book recommends solutions, including regulating online publishers like utilities, prohibiting anonymous users and bots, disclosing funding sources, and regulating algorithms.
Algorithm Warfare: How Elon Musk uses Twitter to control brains. The taxonomy of Trump tweets and how Elon Musk uses X to follow Trump’s playbook. Knowledge of the techniques helps to innoculate oneself from the lies.
Eric Schmidt has a 6-point plan for fighting election misinformation. “Social media platforms need to fundamentally rethink their design for the age of AI, especially as democracies face a historic test worldwide. It’s clear to me the future will be one of many decentralized online spaces that cater to every interest, reflect the views of real humans (not bots), and focus on concrete community concerns. But until that day comes, setting these guardrails in place will help ensure that platforms maintain a healthy standard of discourse and do not let opaque, engagement-driven algorithms allow AI-enabled election content to run rampant.” [Source: MIT Technology Review]
Reddit’s I.P.O. Is a Content Moderation Success Story. “The site’s journey from toxic cesspool to trusted news source illustrates the business value of keeping bad actors at bay.” [Source: The New York Times]